By: Revanche

The flip side of knowing you’re rich (but not feeling it)

October 12, 2021

“I’m trying to teach JB to operate from a spirit of abundance.” I said to a friend.
You?? My dear friend hooted.
I laughed too.

Isn’t it nice to have friends who know you?

As much as I (intellectually) know we are well off, both by comparison to the rest of the world and in absolute terms even if we aren’t in the same league as  our neighbors, I’m still me. My gut is still deeply rooted in the past. It’s lodged in the year 2000 when I didn’t have any financial support for college as promised, when I had to figure out how to make rent AND tuition, still protecting the Past Me that clawed her way to where we are today, inch by bloody inch.

What do I know about the spirit of abundance? Not a whole lot. I’m learning but, confession that’s not going to be a surprise to anyone who’s been here for a while: I’m still scared of being poor again. I’m still scared that it’ll all go pants. That we’ll have to start over with nothing and I won’t have it in me to do that again. I’m still scared of reliving the harsh cold last years of my mom’s life: fighting daily to get by, stressed to the gills about the bills, dying without a penny to leave behind for my kids.

As my therapist says, these are fear thoughts. I know they are. Earlier I stated unequivocally how I know we’re rich. It riled some folks when I said that it’s ridiculous not to know you’re rich when you have multi-millions in the bank. I also said that not feeling rich doesn’t make that a fact, and that if you can’t feel rich with millions, you’re deficient in something but it’s not money. I didn’t write that for clicks. If I had, I would have named names. I wrote that post because it’s both my valid observation and because I know those feelings. I have them from time to time myself! That’s how I recognize them. It’s important to remind myself, as much as anyone else it resonated with, that whatever our feelings are, we ARE rich.

The hell of it is, I can know we are rich, and also have a metric ton of fear thoughts bubbling under the surface. When I make a purchase, especially for myself, I agonize over it. I talk myself out of it, or I need a friend to talk me into it. I know $20 is ok to spend. I know $20 is ok to give. We can afford to send grieving friends flowers more than once, I know that we can help friends in need. Yet I still lie awake some nights (especially if painsomnia is already keeping me up) toting up the spending and second guessing myself. That’s going to happen, and I can’t just tell it to go away.

But maybe, aside from simply being honest with oneself, that’s another reason why it’s so important to be brutally honest about the facts of being rich. Logic can’t banish the fear but logic can pierce the fog that the fear creates. It can elbow aside the overwhelming worry that it’ll all go to pot, and point out that, as scared as my inner child is about how we were always scraping to make rent, we will probably be ok.

It’s been a long time since I had to worry about having enough money to keep the roof over our heads or since I had to juggle bills. A few years ago, I changed my poverty style money management to keeping a reasonable amount of cash in the checking account so I can cover a quarter to a half month of expenses at any given time. That in itself still feels like a luxury, but it’s also such a practical change for the reduction of stress and worry about miscalculating one bill and being hit with overdrafts.

I’d say there’s no rhyme or reason to the fear but that’s not true. It was a learned behavior from a time when fear and worry and scarcity ruled my life. Of course I’m still afraid. It took years to get out of that situation and the habits and thoughts ingrained from that time will take as much time to undo as it took to set them in the first place. Much like teaching anyone who has experienced terrible things to overcome their fears and trauma, I’ve got to have patience and work on getting through the fear. (Edit to add: Also I didn’t make enough to pay the bills and save for retirement for over a decade so that’s a lot of lost savings time that I feel and worry about making up acutely.)

If I have to log into bank accounts twice a day to reassure myself, well, that’s a mostly harmless twitch.

What are the benefits of knowing you’re rich?

We may have come from varying levels of economic backgrounds, but we MUST face how far we have come from being that poor. It’s such an ingrained habit to think of myself as scrabbling to keep up with the bills and that mindset does not serve us when that’s no longer our reality. I used to trick myself into thinking I had less money than I did to protect what I had accumulated painfully and slowly. Those were little mindgames that I was fully aware of, used to beat back the fear. As our financial foundation became more sturdy and I grew into a more mature money manager, I can afford the truth.

Knowing and admitting that we are wealthy means I’m a more compassionate person. I can have empathy for those who still need a helping hand like I once did. My resources aren’t tight like they once were, my compassion doesn’t have to end with my five dollars in my pocket. It’s hard to see others suffering and not be able to help in any material way, so I’m grateful that I can now be in a position where we are ok enough for me to help others a bit. Once upon a time, $5 and $10 made a world of difference to me. It’s my turn to try and make that happen for others.

Knowing and admitting that we are wealthy means I can manage our money proactively rather than defensively. I can make wiser decisions that serve us and grows our financial base instead of stacking up years and years of cash while inflation erodes it.

Knowing and admitting that we are wealthy means, perhaps most importantly, that I can start to answer Emily Guy Birkin’s question which is crucial to a living a rich life: “What is your enough?”

In the end, living a rich life and being rich can’t be simply about the dollars in your bank account, or how ostentatious your lifestyle it. It has to be how you feel and when you feel like you have enough. If you can’t feel rich when you have millions, if I can’t, that’s pretty sad.

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